Caesar Rodney

Caesar Rodney (7 October 1728-16 June 1784) was Governor of Delaware from 31 March 1778 to 6 November 1781, succeeding George Read and preceding John Dickinson.

Biography
Caesar Rodney was born in Kent County, Delaware in 1728, and he was orphaned as a teenager. He was a popular bachelor, and he was elected county sheriff in 1755 and became a captain in the Delaware militia during the French and Indian War. From 1769 to 1777, he also served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Lower Counties, and he was a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, a member of the Delaware Committee of Correspondence, a member of the Assembly of Delaware from 1761 to 1776, and as a member of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776. Rodney signed the US Declaration of Independence, leading to loyalist backlash in Delaware and Rodney's electoral defeat in 1776. Rodney became a Major-General in the Delaware militia during the American Revolutionary War, as well as the wartime Governor of Delaware from 1778 to 1781. He was unable to attend the Congress in 1782 or 1783 due to ill health, and he died of cancer in 1784.